Nothing else matters in their upside-down world: Wealth increases at the top. Global poverty balloons everywhere else where living on $2 a day isn’t enough for a third of the world. Easy pickings. The rich only see more opportunities to make more money when they read in Foreign Policy that “in the United States, when world wheat prices rise by 75%, as they have over the last year, it means the difference between a $2 loaf of bread and a loaf costing maybe $2.10,” warns Lester Brown in “The New Geopolitics of Food … Inside a Hungry Planet.”

But if “you live in New Delhi, those skyrocketing costs really matter: A doubling in the world price of wheat actually means that the wheat you carry home from the market to hand-grind into flour for chapatis costs twice as much. And the same is true with rice. If the world price of rice doubles, so does the price of rice in your neighborhood market in Jakarta. And so does the cost of the bowl of boiled rice on an Indonesian family’s dinner table

New economics of commodity inflation, resource scarcity, and getting rich
“Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally. For Americans, who spend less than one-tenth of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices we’ve seen so far this year are an annoyance, not a calamity. But for the planet’s poorest 2 billion people, who spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food, these soaring prices may mean going from two meals a day to one. Those who are barely hanging on to the lower rungs of the global economic ladder risk losing their grip entirely. This can contribute—and it has—to revolutions and upheaval.

Yes, it will get worse, far worse. Global population is sky-rocketing, tripling from 3 to 9 billion between 1950 and 2050, as the “Super-Rich” at the top will get richer, as poverty spreads, as more and more go to bed hungry in emerging and developing economies. And “revolutions and upheaval” mean increased global wars over depleting hard assets. In the upside-down worldview the “Super-Rich” will soon have to deal more than that extra dime for a loaf of Walmart bread. The cost of America’s denial will be trillions as the threat of WWIII grows exponentially.

Remember the Pentagon forecast: Global population growth leads to “massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes … By 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening … an old pattern could emerge; warfare defining human life.” As this threat of WWIII increases, America is the major target for many emerging and developing economies.

“Commodity Inflation Revolution” ends America as “Global Super-Power”
Jeremy Grantham is a Cassandra, warning, crying wolf. Has been for many years. His firm manages $100 billion. He warned of the 2008 meltdown 18 months in advance. While Grantham’s latest Quarterly Letter offers faint signs of hope, the truth is, he’s predicting a no-win scenario for America in “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever.” ….

read full column at MarketWatch.com

Lobbyists are hired guns, influence peddlers. Their allegiance is to whomever’s paying their fees—a foreign dictator, an Indian casino, farm conglomerate, oil giant, even a small town in Middle America. And yes, lobbyists often push the agenda of one or the other political party. But in every case, lobbyists are paid to get specific government favors, money or tax benefits for a specific “client.” Their focus is narrow, their goals selfish. They are not voters, not patriots and they’re definitely not acting for the common good, in “best interests of the country.” In fact, the “special interests” of a lobbyist’s clients are usually not in best interests of America.

How bad is it? In “Congressional Revolving Doors: The Journey from Congress to K Street,” Public Citizen (LobbyingInfo.org) wrote: “The revolving door on the journey from Capitol Hill to the lucrative world of federal lobbying is spinning at a rapid rate. Congress is no longer a mere destination for those seeking a seat in one of the world’s most famous legislative bodies. For many lawmakers, it has become a way station to wealth, a necessary period of job training and network building so that after leaving their public service jobs they can sell their influence to those with deep pockets … Lobbying is the top career choice for departing members of Congress.”

Lobbying is now “Washington’s Biggest Business”
Lobbying is actually quite new in American history. A couple years ago the Washington Post ran a revealing 25-part special series: “Citizen K Street: The Life & Career of Gerald S. J. Cassidy: How Lobbying Became Washington’s Biggest Business.” Cassidy is the founder and owner of “the most lucrative lobbying firm in Washington … a godfather of the influence business.” The series later became Robert Kaiser’s brilliant: So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying & the Corrosion of American Government.Cassidy’s “innovation was the first modern ‘earmarked appropriations,’ federal funds directed by Congress to private institutions when no federal agency had proposed spending the money. Over the subsequent three decades, the government dispensed billions of dollars in ‘earmarks,’ and lobbying for such appropriations became a booming Washington industry.” The Post concluded that Cassidy has profited handsomely along the way: He “helped invent the new Washington, which had made him seriously rich. His personal fortune exceeded $125 million.”

Politicians and lobbyists—mutual back-scratching society
Lobbyists have to work closely with the politicians—to get the votes they need, and the big perks for the big money they represent. So both benefit from these chummy relationships as we see in a New York Times story, “Big Money Still Learning to Lobby: On a cold evening in late January 2007, Senator Charles E. Schumer invited a who’s who of hedge funds to dinner at Bottega del Vino on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. More than $100 billion worth of wealth sat around the table … Mr. Schumer, the New York Democrat, had some simple advice for the billionaires in his midst: If you want Washington to work with you, you had better work better with one another.”

And presumably, work closely with Schumer, a member of various Senate committees, including Banking and Finance, and chair of the Economic Policy Subcommittee. The Times continued: “Now, united by a desire to avoid stringent regulation and a healthy sense of competition—there are three hedge fund lobbying groups—the industry seems resigned to no longer being a wallflower and looks set to join the dance with Congress. So far the industry’s efforts have witnessed remarkable results.

More than two years after the Securities and Exchange Commission required that funds register with the agency—a move overturned by a federal appeals court last summer—the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, Congress and the SEC seem to agree: hedge funds are as regulated today as they should be.” The Times quoted David Tittsworth, head of the Investment Adviser Association, commenting that hedge funds have been “extraordinarily effective in lobbying … The hedge fund industry—whoever they are and whoever is representing them—has been successful in fighting a centralized and comprehensive regulatory scheme.” So, their veil of secrecy remains protected, thanks to lobbyists brokering a deal between members of Congress and these financial power-players.

Lobbyists outnumber elected officials by huge margin
Lobbyists power exists at the state level too. In a 2006 Barron’s magazine article citing data from The Center for Public Integrity, we learned that: “The number of lobbyists and the amount spent on lobbying has swelled over the years … New York State had 3,842 lobbyists, 18 for each elected legislator. Colorado, Florida, Illinois and Ohio each had 10 per legislator,” a total of about 40,000 state lobbyists. In addition, Washington lobbyists doubled since 2000 to about 35,000. That’s a ratio in excess of 65:1—sixty-five lobbyists per elected official, a total of 435 Congressional representatives, 100 Senators, one President and one Vice President.

And things are getting worse according to another Washington Post report, “The Road to Riches Is Called K Street,” quoting one of America’s elected-officials-turned-lobbyist: “There’s unlimited business out there for us,” said Robert L. Livingston, a Republican and former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, now president of a thriving lobbying firm, “companies need lobbying help.” Get it! They focus on helping businesses, not the public. “Lobbying firms can’t hire people fast enough,” says The Post. “Starting salaries have risen to about $300,000 a year for the best-connected aides [which is luring] nearly half of all lawmakers who return to the private sector when they leave Congress, according to a forthcoming study by Public Citizen’s Congress Watch.”

Unfortunately, this is not good news according to the critics. The story goes on to say: “Political historians don’t see these as positive developments for democracy. ‘We’ve got a problem here,’ said Allan Cigler, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. ‘The growth of lobbying makes it even worse than it already is in the balance between those with resources and those without resources’.” And you thought your vote counted … now that is irrational!

FirstPub.MarketWatch: Sept’09

If financial reform ain’t dead, it’ll end up watered down to nothing. That was obvious in a recent Charlie Rose interview with financial reformer Elizabeth Warren in Bloomberg/BusinessWeek: Outrage and Financial Reform. Warren’s a Harvard Law School Professor chairing of the Congressional Oversight Panel. The panel was ”created in 2008 to monitor the Treasury’s bank bailout and to review the regulation of financial markets.” Wall Street hates any reform that would expose their insatiable greed fighting all financial reforms in America, especially the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). So Wall Street doesn’t like Warren much. Here are a few clips summarizing why she’s an Eliot Ness character they’d like to eliminate:

There are seven bureaucracies in Washington right now that each own a piece of consumer financial protection. Bloated, inefficient, and either ignored and ineffective or captured by the large financial institutions. [This is] the regulatory system we’ve got now. It works very well for the large financial institutions because it means no effective regulation. What I want is to take this agency out of those seven agencies, shrink it down, and make it effective. You’ve got to have an agency that’s ultimately independent, whether it’s located within the Fed, within Treasury, within the Department of Agriculture, or whether it sits in its own separate place. The key is whether or not it is functionally independent. Does it write its own rules? Does it enforce those rules and does it have access to a budget that’s independent of the folks who want to smother it?

This is an agency that just makes sense. This isn’t liberal or conservative. This isn’t a division of ideology. This is about bank lobbyists. This is about people who are paid professionally to kill this agency so they can protect the revenues of Wall Street banks. …

Rose then put the core question of indepencence in context: “As part of overall financial reform, where do you put the significance of the agency?”

The tip of the spear in the sense that this is where our financial crisis started: one lousy mortgage at a time; one family who got tricked, cheated at a time. Then those risks were sliced, diced, and put into all kinds of fancy financial instruments that made billions for Wall Street banks and then [crashed] the whole system … We started at families. The other end is too big to fail. [We need] a Chapter 11 system, whatever we want to call it, a part of the legal structure that permits us as a people to say with real credibility: I don’t care what your business is. I don’t care how big you are, how intertwined you are. If you make bad enough decisions, you can be liquidated. Your shareholders wiped out and top management fired.

Huffington Post reports the Senate may have a compromise that House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank called a “joke” that it won’t pass in the House.

“Elizabeth Warren has one message: Pass a strong bill or nothing at all … There’s been a steady leak of Senate proposals to fix the dysfunctional way federal regulators protect consumers from abusive lenders. One was an independent unit housed within the Treasury Department; another was a new entity, housed in the Federal Reserve, with little independence or power.  The Senate shouldn’t waste its time, asserts Warren, explaining that current proposals fail to address some of her key priorities such as arming the proposed agency with independent rule-making authority, without interference by bank regulators.”

Now you see why the “too-political-to-fail” fat-cat banks are spending hundreds of millions to lobbyists to kill all financial reforms, especially CFPA, and what Elizabeth Warren is Wall Street’s Eliot Ness.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers must be holding their heads a little higher when they walk into P.T.A. meetings and neighborhood parties these days, knowing that corporate lobbyists have overtaken them as the most despised professionals in America. Lobbyists have never been especially popular … As a candidate, Barack Obama made a point of vowing to banish them from the White House. (This proved considerably harder to do than it was to say … In the past year, though, antilobbyist fervor has grown even more intense, as hope for a new governing era has given way to frustration with a divided capital and a dysfunctional Congress.

The outrage reached a fever pitch in January when the Supreme Court ruled that a Fortune 500 corporation enjoys the same First Amendment right to influence the political process as the guy who puts a yard sign on his lawn. Responding in The Nation and The Los Angeles Times,the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig incited an online furor when he accused President Obama of betraying his fellow liberals by declining to confront the capital’s culture of corporate dependence. ‘Congress has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash,’ Lessig wrote, blaming moneyed interests for knocking the public option out of the Democratic health care plan …

Bai adds specifics: Toyota’s lobbying bill of $25 million. How Microsoft and Dell spent millions to preserve a $15.5 billion tax loophole. And elsewhere we learned that Wall Street spent $400 million on lobbyists to kill financial reforms. How the $2.5 trillion healthcare industry spend even more killing healthcare reforms. But Bai’s main point is about how individual Senators and Congressional Representatives have lost their moral compass: “The truth is that anyone who spends any significant time in the political world knows that corporate money, raised and leveraged by lobbyists, is perverting any notion of good policymaking, as surely as ice dancing perverts the idea of sport.” Bai concludes …

The problem with Lessig’s indictment and others like it isn’t that they are too hard on lobbyists who try to influence the system. It’s that they’re too easy on the politicians who cave to the pressure. … The flaw here is that if our senators and congressmen really wanted to be ideal public servants, they wouldn’t need us to protect them from their corporate patrons. Rather, they would simply do what’s right and face the consequences. … Is it really so outside the bounds of human nature to expect congressmen to serve the interests of the voters, even when their own ­re-elections are in jeopardy? The political system is imperiled mostly because too many of our politicians just can’t seem to imagine any worse fate in life than losing an election. … a lot of lawmakers still cling to their seats at any cost to conscience or to constituency, as if it were the only job they could ever see themselves holding …

So the bigger picture is not just the blame game, pinning the problem on either lobbyists or Congress. It’s not even the loss of democracy and the rise of America’s new “Corporate Anarchy.”  The real problem is that Americans have “lost their moral compass,” and are sinking deep into a narcissistic soul-sickness.

Can Obama crack down on America’s second-biggest river of industrial waste? Big coal has spent millions of dollars over the past year touting the virtues of what the industry calls ‘clean coal,’ but it’s no secret that coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel. When you burn it, coal releases monstrous quantities of deadly compounds and gases — and it all has to go somewhere. The worst of the waste — heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium and mercury, all of which are highly toxic — are concentrated in the ash that’s left over after coal is burned or in the dirty sludge that’s scrubbed from smokestacks. Each year, coal plants in the U.S. churn out nearly 140 million tons of coal ash — more than 900 pounds for every American — generating the country’s second-largest stream of industrial waste, surpassed only by mining. If you piled all the coal ash on a single football field, it would create a toxic mountain more than 20 miles high.

And we’re worried about China, who’s now ahead of us in alternative energy investing. And we refused to lead in signing strong accords in Kyoto and Copenhagen. Here’s Goodell’s take on our lack of leadership: “As the World Burns: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most aggressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming.”

The Senate’s failure to act helped torpedo the talks in Copenhagen, which not only failed to produce a binding treaty but postponed meaningful action until 2015. It has also left Obama with no clear strategy of how to move forward. “We’re staring into the abyss,” says Dan Dudek, chief economist for the Environmental Defense Fund. The best hope is that Democrats manage to pass a climate bill this spring, paving the way for an international treaty that will cut carbon pollution before rising sea levels engulf low-lying nations. “It’s really about getting people to focus on fact and not fiction,” says Sen. Kerry, who will play a key role in guiding legislation through the Senate. “As long as we can argue this on real science — not on phony numbers trumped up to scare people — I believe we can get to the place where people realize that curbing climate change will strengthen America’s economy and enhance our security.” …

The most disturbing achievement of the energy industry in the battle over global warming is its success in lowering our expectations. Climate activists like to talk about mobilizing all of America’s resources, as we did during World War II, to fight global warming. But as the failure to pass the climate bill reveals, it may be easier to defeat a dictator like Hitler than to overcome internal threats to our future as powerful as Big Coal and Big Oil. Despite the near-certainty of a climate catastrophe, there are no crowds marching in the streets to demand action, no prime-time speech from President Obama. Even the most aggressive climate legislation the Senate might pass — something on par with the House bill — will still fall tragically short of what climate scientists tell us needs to be done to avoid the looming chaos and destruction. In that sense — the only one that ultimately matters — the battle over global warming may already be over.

Unfortunately, this fear may emerge as reality given the short-term mindsets of Washington politicans, the coal/oil/energy industry and their lobbyists who appear on track to fulfilling the predictions made by evolutionary anthropologist Jared Diamond’s best-seller “Collapse” where he warns, a “society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.” Warning, America may have peaked in 2000.

A little-known group, the Committee for Truth in Politics, recently made a big splash: It spent $5 million on television ads denouncing Democratic efforts in Congress to impose new regulations on the financial industry. The public can’t find out who’s behind the ads, because the group doesn’t have to disclose its donors under federal law. The group’s lawyer Jim Bopp, a Republican activist from Terre Haute, Ind., won’t reveal details about donors or organizers, saying they must be protected from lawmakers who will “attack and punish people who are willing to step forward and tell the truth about politicians.”

The organization is among a cluster of non-profit groups that have launched new operations in recent months in advance of key votes on the issue on Capitol Hill and November’s elections for Congress. The Committee for Truth in Politics spent more on TV ads than any other group from Jan. 22 to March 18, according to Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks ads. Overall, outside groups spent $12.5 million on TV ads to slam proposals pushed by congressional  Democrats and President Obama during that period, compared with $1.5 million by those backing Democrats. Campaign-finance watchdogs, such as Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center, predict even more activity in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision freeing corporations and unions to spend millions of dollars on campaign ads.

New groups have been started by several prominent Republicans, including Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, and Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Fred Malek — a top GOP fundraiser involved in two other new groups, the American Action Forum and the American Action Network — said there’s a surge of political activity among Republicans who are “concerned about big government, big spending and big debt. …

“Concerned about big government, big spending and big debt?” They must be joking. Where were these ”big spending” Republicans when they controlled the presidency and both houses from 2000 to 2008? Unfortunately, their motives and credibility are suspect.

People feel there’s an opportunity to reorient the direction of the country and to get our message out and change things.” Malek describes the two groups as advancing center-right ideas and not being affiliated with any political party.

Democrats did the same thing when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress. For instance, the now-defunct America Coming Together, whose contributors included billionaire financier George Soros, poured millions into the 2004 elections. The left-leaning group was required to disclose its donors but raised and spent unlimited amounts of money by operating under federal tax laws. …Most of the new groups are known as 501(c)4s for the section of the tax code governing their activities. They won’t have to report their donors publicly as long they spend less than 50% of their funds to influence candidate elections and steer clear of  funding television and radio ads that mention a
candidate close to Election Day or that call for the election or defeat of candidates.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., grew so angry about the recent Committee for Truth in Politics ad targeting him that he fired off a letter last month to Bopp, the group’s lawyer, demanding to know who was behind it. “We need to have as much transparency as possible in government,” he said in an interview. “If these are a bunch of Wall Street brokers who are running these ads, I think people ought to know that.”

Here’s a tip: Yes, the lack of transparency is the big problem. We’ve been exposing that problem for years. There is a simple solution. You need to question every ad, political or financial, whether Obama, Goldman Sachs or Liz Cheney are behind it. What The Buddha said 2,500 years ago applies even more today in 2010: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

Why is Senator Chris Dodd’s final act to sabotage the Consumer Financial Protection Agency? Answer: He’s helping himself, not the little guy. His new proposal for CFPA is a screwing for taxpayers, investors, savers, mortgagees and consumers. It’s clear Dodd is following a time-honored Washington tradition that’s creating the new “Lobbyist Nation of America:” Dodd is “interviewing” for a high-paying job as a lobbyist. That’s why he’s screwing the American public by proposing a watered-down pro-Wall Street version of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that offers few protections, no rulemaking powers and no independent “agency” status in Treasury, as it gets buried deep in The Fed’s dingy basement, where Bernanke can avoid it. Barney Frank calls it a “bad joke.”

In short, Dodd is trading his integrity for a nice big fat salary later when he becomes a lobbyist. Lobbyist? How do I know that? More than a hunch, I’m playing the odds. Over a third of all lobbyists were either members of Congress or staffers before becoming lobbyists. Watchdog Public Citizen says Congress is a revolving door: “Congress is no longer a mere destination for those seeking a seat in one of the world’s most famous legislative bodies. For many lawmakers, it has become a way station to wealth, a necessary period of job training and network building so that after leaving their public service jobs they can sell their influence to those with deep pockets.”

Here’s a perfect example Dodd knows very well. When his old friend, former Senate GOP majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi resigned a couple years ago Lott teamed up former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana. “Compensation experts and other lobbyists say Lott’s access and unflagging hustle will probably interest companies enough to net him millions out of the starting gate, quite an improvement over his $165,200 Senate salary … as much as $50,00 a month as a baseline,” plus $200,000 annually speaking and another $500,000 on corporate boards for an “estimated annual value of $4 million to $6 million.” In fact, most of Washington’s 42,000 lobbyists make more than our 537 elected officials. In short, Dodd knows all to well he can richer, faster, with less stress as a lobbyist than as a senator. So he’s throwing investors, consumers and the rest of Main Street America “under the bus.’ Denuding CFPA, yes, that’s Dodd’s “interview!” And Wall Street will love him and his connections in Washington. He won’t even have to leave town.

Here’s a summary of Dodd’s problems from the Huffington Post’s article, “Consumer Groups Rip Chris Dodd Over Financial Protection Agency Compromise.”

Consumer advocates are reacting harshly to a compromise Consumer Financial Protection Agency being proposed by Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). Under Dodd’s plan, “the agency proposal would be dropped.” Consumer groups and labor unions had been pushing for independence as key to the agency’s success. Bank regulators, they argued, should not have authority to veto consumer protection rules, because they have the interests of the banking sector as their central priority, rather than concern for abusive practices. Consumer groups also wanted a presidentially-appointed head of the agency and an independent funding stream.

Dodd’s proposal includes both of those. But without independence, the agency loses its ability to write or enforce strong rules. “We appreciate Chairman Dodd’s extensive efforts to secure bipartisan support for this critical part of the financial reform bill, but effective reform is once again being blocked by opposition from the big banks that caused the current financial crisis. The revised proposal does not provide what is needed to protect American families or the financial system as a whole: a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency with the power to set and enforce fair rules for all types of credit,” said Heather Booth, Executive Director of Americans for Financial Reform, in a statement. …

Dodd’s proposal puts a variety of obstacles in front of the proposed agency, which would be called the Bureau of Financial Protection and housed in the Treasury Department. Each time the agency wanted to write a rule, it would have to consult with bank regulators. The agency would then have to respond to each and every bank regulator objection in the Federal Register. If the bank regulator was still unsatisfied, it could appeal to the “systemic regulator,” whose mission is to protect the safety and soundness of the banking industry. Anytime a new rule is proposed, bank lobbyists argue that it will be burdensome and make the system less safe and sound. If the systemic regulator agreed with the banks — as they often do — then the consumer protection rule would be voided. Notably, the consumer protection agency has no veto power over any rules issued by bank regulators, which demonstrates which regulator will be superior. The first concern is the banks. Dodd’s proposal is much weaker than that called for by the House and by President Obama.

What a embarrassing final act proposing this useless, toothless tiger. Will the senator actually become a lobbyist? The odds are probably at least 60-40. The lure of the big bucks for a guy with his connections is just too good to pass up. More likely, they’ll come get him. In fact, Dodd’s pro-Wall Street sabotaging of the the Consumer Financial Protection Agency probably eliminates any need to “interview.” Besides, there’s probably an unspoken offer on the table already. So the taxpayers gets screwed again. And Wall Street’s control of America gets tighter.